Research

At Webis, I worked as a PostDoc in the field of natural language processing with a focus on computational argumentation. The general question that has driven most of my research was:

How do people argue today?

With colleagues and other researchers around the world, we developed computational text analysis approaches to identify common, good, and bad ways of arguing. In particular, I focus on the following tasks:

Modeling the overall argumentation of natural language text

Analyzing the argumentation strategy of the author of a text

Assessing argument and argumentation quality

Searching on the web for relevant arguments

Many of the outcomes of our research can be found at www.arguana.com. Possible applications are writing assistance in word processors, automated grading in open online education, or argument retrieval in web search engines. In summer 2017, we published the first version of our argument search engine, args.me.

I will continue the research on computational argumentation in Paderborn, staying in close collaboration with the Webis group as far as possible.

Teaching

At the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, I supervised or co-supervised the following courses: